Joonas Vola’s research while affiliated with University of Lapland and other places

The condition of forests is a major issue when it comes to climate change and biodiversity. One way to define the quality of a forest is by its age. In the cross pressure of socio-economic and ecological guidelines, what qualifies as an old-growth forest is not determined by a mere number but the co-constitution of various measurements, indicators, political ambitions, and the performance of the measured biological ‘units’ themselves. This transdisciplinary chapter studies how old-growth forests are made-to-measure, moving from close proximity encounters with an indicator organism, being-with-beard lichen, to the internationally defined level and timescale of economic activity and (un)management in categorising forest ecology, wherein various compromises in decision-making may also compromise local ecosystems and the vastness of scale in the biosphere. The study heads off to the ‘roots’ of science—definitions, conceptualisations, onto-epistemology, and methodologies—considering how they as active processes are performing the entity of the ‘old-growth forest’ by cutting-together-apart on multiple scales.

The introductory chapter ‘Staying proximate’ welcomes the reader to stay with more-than-human relations in present times of ecological crisis, known as the age of the Anthropocene. The chapter joins feminist, postcolonial, and Indigenous environmental scholars’ call for more nuanced alternatives to the Anthropocenic imaginary, ones that attend to the multiplicity, difference, and uneven distribution of more-than-human responsibilities, vulnerabilities, and sufferings in the world. We seek alternatives to the distancing, generalising, and even apocalyptic imaginaries of the Anthropocene by engaging with mundane beings, relations, and places in the north. By gathering around uncomfortable concerns, we develop modes of proximity as affirmative entry points underlining the commitment to stay with the trouble in caring, sensitive, and thoughtful ways. We suggest openness, affinity, engagement, irritation, middleness, and scopic modes of attuning to and engaging with more-than-human worlds. It is these modes of attuning to our proximate relations that provide a radical standpoint of proximity that intensifies, enriches, and complicates our research inquiries in such times of all-encompassing ecological turmoil.

This work presents a post-qualitative inquiry into using cinema as a method for studying proximity. The vastness of spatiotemporal dimensions makes the comprehension of the Anthropocene through the lens of closeness a major dilemma. One can try to perceive this epoch in terms of a landscape: a ‘scopic’ scenery seen from a distance or, in contrast, a shape composed from the land by repeated acts and mass of actors. This dominant human influence from the network of actors invested in this geological era in the making is visible in an experimental documentary film, Koyaannisqatsi—The world out of balance (1982). The film utilises timelapse and slow motion to de- and rehumanise the mass and speed of human movement, strategies implemented alongside its musical score, a soundscape of repetitive phrases and shifting layers. These cinematic techniques reveal the ‘anthroposcenic’ in mundane life, locating the hyperobject of the Anthropocene as a perceivable ANThroposcenery.

Aesthetics is the study of the sensible in the sensuous. In judging sensitivity and sense-making, aesthetics becomes a subject of ethical and political debate. The Arctic is traditionally aestheticized as a uniformly frozen and wild clime, with its people depicted from the Western perspective as exotic Others and subjected to certain colonial and commercial practices. To achieve a contemporary image of the politics of Arctic aesthetics, the chapter undertakes a case study of the video artwork Grind (2011) by Jenni Hiltunen, criticized as an instance of cultural appropriation of the indigenous Sámi people. The analysis extends the Arctic beyond its geographically defined borders into a realm marked by Othering, marginality, appropriation, colonialism and a particular political economy.